The public knew only the wicked Stephen Coburn. His crime had been his entrance into fame. All the bad things he had done, all the bad people he had known, all the bad places he had gone, were searched out and published by the detectives and the reporters. To blacken Stephen Coburn's repute so horribly that the jurors would feel it their inescapable duty to scavenge him from the offended earth, that was the effort of the prosecution. To prevent that blackening was one of the most vital and one of the most costly features of the defense. To deny the murder and tear down the web of circumstantial evidence as fast as the State could weave it was another. The Coburn case had become a notorious example of that peculiarly American institution, the serial trial. The first instalment had ended in a verdict of guilty. It had been old Coburn's task to hold up his wife and his son in the collapse of their mad despair, while he managed and financed the long, slow struggle with the upper courts till he wrung from them an order for a new trial. This had ended, after weeks of torment in the court-room and forty-eight hours of almost unbearable suspense, in a disagreement of the jury. The third trial found the prosecution more determined than ever, and acquainted with all the methods of the defense. The only flaw was the loss of an important witness, "the man across the hall," whom impatient time had carried off to the place where subpoenas are not respected. His deposition and his testimony at the previous trials were as lacking in vitality as himself. And now once more old Coburn must carry everything upon his back, aching like a world-weary Atlas who dares not shift his burden. But now he was three years weaker, and he had no more money to squander. His house, his acres, the cattle upon his hills, his blooded thoroughbreds, his patriarchal stallions, his town lots, his bank-building, his bonds and stocks, all were sold, pawned as collateral, or blanketed with mortgages. As he had comforted his wife when they had witnessed the bolt from the blue, so now he sat facing her in her third ordeal. Only now she was not on the home porch, but in the arena. He could not hold her hands. Now she dared not close her eyes and cry; it was not the work of one thunderbolt she had to see. Now, under the darting questions of the court-examiner, she was like a frightened girl lost in the woods and groping through a tempest, with lightning thrusts pursuing her on every side, stitching the woods with fire like the needle in a sewing-machine stabbing and stabbing at the dodging shuttle.